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Like Brian Reynolds above, it's the third-party scripts that seem to slow down our load times and we now keep these down to a minimum and have no hesitation in switching if their performance is too slow.

We use jQuery at latestdiscountvouchers.co.uk and had previously hosted the .js for this locally in combination with a jCarousel script. However, we've switched to using the free Google CDN for the main jQuery script (http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js) and still locally host the jCarousel script. This has reduced our initial page load speed by another 0.3 to 0.4s.

For initial page load on the homepage of the website above, there's are a few more improvements that can be done but they are just minor ones. We believe that most of our speed improvements are now completed. We could also use a CDN for further speed reductions, but don't see the need for this currently but will look at Amazon CloudFront that was mentioned above.

In terms of timings, we used WebPageTest.org (London, IE8) and the results said that it was 1.960s for our initial page load. The key point for us, with this, is that our page load is ahead of our major competitors, which is the source of our main performance benchmarks.